HIS HD68xx Graphics Cards Good overclockers go head to head

Author: Jouni 'Jipa' Vasama Published: 08.03.2011 Manufacturer: HIS Product Group: Graphics cards In English Suomeksi

Crysis Warhead

Crysis Warhead, Crossfires lead the way, but this time the HD6870 manages to score higher frame rates than the GTX470. Other than that it's business as usual, with the HD6850's lining up on both sides of the HD5850, again depending on the clock speeds.

Far Cry 2

And finally Far Cry 2. Another great performance by the Crossfires, followed by the single cards in the same order as in most of the other tests. To wrap up the performance tests it's fair to say that the Barts cards are not as fast as the last gen HD5870, but compete very closely with the HD5850. Keeping in mind the HD6850 replaces the HD5770, the improvement is very nice. In the Far Cry, for example, even the stock speed HD6850 beats the HD5770 by 76%.

Manual OverClocking

Maxing the Catalyst overclocking left us wanting for a bit more. We decided to run all the tests using the clock speeds achieved in the Catalyst, but after those tests were ran, it was time for some further tweaking in Sapphire Trixx. The Trixx not only offers better headroom for the GPU and memory clock speeds, but also gives access to tweaking the Vcore of the GPU. The voltage tweaks are always done on your own risk and we don't really encourage this. These tests were only done out of curiosity to see what kind of performance the HD6850 really has to offer when teased with a stick.

Just as expected, the HD6850 had a LOT more to offer in terms of overclocking than the Catalyst had shown. At core voltage of 1,23 V we managed to push the IceQ X up to impressive 1020 MHz. This is a 200 MHz rise over the stock clock speed and this being a factory clocked card, it's a 245 MHz rise over the reference clock speed. The HIS HD6850 also got up to 1000 MHz, which is also very impressive.

We did also try voltage tweaking with the HD6870, but the results were not so great so there were no reason to include them to the graph. At the higher Vcore of 1,23 V the maximum OC only got up from 945 MHz to 960 MHz. This resulted only 128 points better results in Performance and 38 points better in Extreme.

We only ran the 3Dmark11 test with these clock speeds, and the results show a massive improvement over the stock- and maximum Catalyst-speeds. This really goes to show that if you're brave enough to tinker with the voltage, these Barts-cards offer a lot of potential.

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